Z.AI GLM-5.2 Open-Source Model Enters Global Top 3

Samantha: Welcome to The State of Tech, The European Edition, Friday June twenty-sixth, 2026. I'm Samantha Lawrence.

Bob: And I'm Bob Russell. Today: a Chinese AI model breaks into the global top three just as Washington locks foreign users out of its best American rivals. IBM says it can keep Moore's Law alive for another decade with a chip smaller than anything we've seen. Qualcomm pivots hard into AI data centres and buys a software startup to back it up. Wikipedia bans its own co-founder Larry Sanger. And to close out, two things you can actually use today: a free, private photo workflow tool called RawTherapee, and a no-tracking maps app called Organic Maps. Let's get into it.

Chinese startup Z dot A I cracks the global top three with an open-source model eight times cheaper than Anthropic.

Samantha: We start in Beijing, because the global AI map shifted this week. Chinese startup Z dot A I has released GLM five point two, an open-source model that, according to benchmark trackers, is now almost on par with Anthropic's top-end Fable and Mythos systems, but eight times cheaper to run. The timing is uncomfortable: it landed the same week Washington forced Anthropic to cut off foreign users from those exact models. The New York Times reports that six of the ten most popular AI models in the world now come from China, and experts quoted in the piece say the gap with the American frontier has shrunk to roughly six months.

Bob: And the customer list is the part that should make European boards pay attention. Silicon Valley names like Baseten are switching, and Microsoft is reportedly considering DeepSeek for parts of its stack. So this is not a curiosity from a faraway market, it is showing up inside Western infrastructure. There is a catch, of course. Z dot A I sits on the US trade blacklist, and according to the Times some of its shareholders are linked to Chinese defence bodies. Anthropic has separately accused Alibaba of running twenty-four thousand fake accounts to copy its technology. So the trust question is real.

Samantha: For European and Dutch companies the decision has suddenly become very concrete. You can self-host these Chinese open-source models, which means no data leaves your servers for China. That removes one objection. What stays is the geopolitical and reputational layer: do you want a model from a blacklisted vendor running your customer service, your legal review, your code base? Brussels has been pushing sovereign AI for two years, and this is the moment that argument stops being theoretical.

Bob: The bottom line: Washington is narrowing access to its best models, and Beijing is filling the gap with cheaper open weights. European buyers are caught in the middle, and the cost difference is large enough that finance directors will absolutely ask the question. Expect national regulators in The Hague, Berlin and Paris to put out guidance on this within weeks, because procurement teams are not going to wait.

IBM unveils a zero point seven nanometer chip and says Moore's Law has another decade in it.

Samantha: Now to the hardware side, because this one matters more than it sounds. IBM has shown off a new chip design at zero point seven nanometers, the first ever below the one-nanometer line. It uses what IBM calls a nanostack transistor, and it packs nearly one hundred billion transistors onto a chip the size of a fingernail. That is roughly double the density of the two-nanometer generation from a few years ago. The headline numbers: fifty percent more computing power, or seventy percent better energy efficiency, depending on how you tune it.

Bob: And energy is exactly the bottleneck right now. AI data centres are eating so much power that grid operators in Ireland, the Netherlands and Northern Virginia are slowing down new connections. A chip that delivers the same work for thirty percent of the electricity is not a luxury, it is the difference between a data centre getting built or not. Industry analyst Dan Hutcheson, quoted in the New York Times, says this puts another ten to fifteen years on the semiconductor roadmap. So the obituary for Moore's Law was premature.

Samantha: A practical note, because the spec sheet hides the business model. Eye-Bee-Em does not make chips itself anymore. It licenses the design, and the actual production will run through Samsung and the Japanese newcomer Rapidus. Production is still about five years away. So nobody is buying a zero point seven nanometer phone next Christmas. But the licensing route is interesting for Europe, because it gives non-American foundries a path in, including the new fabs being built in Germany and France under the European Chips Act.

Samantha: The quiet story underneath the AI race is this one. Whoever controls the next generation of chip miniaturisation controls who can afford to train the next generation of models. That is geopolitics, not just engineering. Quick interruption. If you listen to The State of Tech regularly, hit that like button and subscribe, that way you'll never miss an episode. Okay, moving on.

Qualcomm doubles down on AI data centres, signs up Microsoft and Meta, and buys software startup Modular.

Bob: Qualcomm, the company most people know from smartphone chips, is making its biggest strategic shift in years. It has doubled its sales target for AI data centre chips and unveiled a new architecture called High Bandwidth Compute, which is designed to use cheaper memory than the standard high bandwidth memory everyone else uses. The pitch is simple: comparable performance, lower power draw, lower cost. And it already has two anchor customers, Microsoft and Meta. Meta is adopting Qualcomm's Dragonfly C one thousand processor for parts of its AI infrastructure.

Samantha: And on the same day, Qualcomm announced it is buying Modular, an AI software startup founded by some of the original engineers behind Apple's chip compiler work. That matters because the hardest part of competing with Nvidia is not the silicon, it is the software stack around it. Developers do not want to rewrite their models for a new chip. Modular gives Qualcomm a credible answer to that.

Bob: For European cloud providers, this is genuinely useful news. Today, if you want to build out AI capacity, you are essentially shopping at one store. A second serious supplier means better pricing power and less single-vendor risk. Operators like OVHcloud in France and the Nordic data centre cluster have been vocal about this dependency. A power-efficient alternative also fits the European energy reality, where electricity is expensive and grid capacity is tight.

Samantha: The risk for Qualcomm is execution. Promising AI chips and shipping them at scale are two very different things, and several rivals have stumbled at exactly this step. But with Microsoft and Meta already on board, the company has bought itself a runway. Watch whether European hyperscalers join that customer list in the next quarter, because that is the real signal.

Wikipedia permanently bans co-founder Larry Sanger after he rallied his X followers to influence an internal vote.

Bob: Now to a story about governance on the internet's biggest reference work. Wikipedia has permanently banned its own co-founder Larry Sanger as an editor. Sanger helped start the site in two thousand and one, left in two thousand and two, and has been a vocal critic ever since. Last week he used his ninety-three thousand followers on X to drum up support for an internal proposal called WikiProject Intellectual Diversity, aimed at broadening the range of viewpoints on the site. Volunteer editors then voted him off the platform for what they call canvassing: campaigning off-site to swing an internal vote.

Samantha: Sanger's response was not subtle. He called Wikipedia, quote, one of the most effective propaganda organs of the establishment in history. Wikipedia, for its part, says the rules apply to everyone regardless of who you are, including the people who helped found it. And technically, the rule against canvassing is long-standing and well documented; he is not being banned for his opinions, he is being banned for the method.

Bob: The deeper tension here is one every large platform faces. Wikipedia depends on volunteer self-governance to stay neutral. The moment outside mobilisation, on X or anywhere else, can tilt an internal vote, that neutrality breaks. So the platform enforces hard. The counter-argument is that this same mechanism can also entrench whichever group already dominates the editor base.

Samantha: It matters more than it looks, because Wikipedia is increasingly the training data for AI models. Whatever ends up in Wikipedia ends up shaping how chatbots answer questions. So the question of who decides what is neutral on Wikipedia is no longer just an editorial question, it is an AI training question. European regulators looking at AI transparency under the AI Act are starting to notice that.

RawTherapee gives you a free, professional-grade photo editor that keeps every raw file on your own machine.

Bob: To close out, two things you can actually try this weekend. First one is for anyone who takes photos with anything more serious than a phone. The tool is called RawTherapee. It is a free, open-source photo editor that processes raw camera files, the unprocessed image data straight out of a camera sensor, and it runs entirely on your own computer. No subscription, no cloud upload, no account to create.

Samantha: For context, the dominant product in this space is Adobe Lightroom, which now pushes you toward a monthly subscription and cloud sync. RawTherapee does the same core job, exposure correction, colour grading, noise reduction, lens corrections, without any of that. Reviewers on photography sites consistently rank it alongside the paid tools for image quality, especially for landscape and portrait work.

Bob: It works on Windows, Mac and Linux, and it handles raw files from pretty much every major camera brand: Canon, Nikon, Sony, Fujifilm, Panasonic. The learning curve is real, it is not a one-click filter app, but there are good tutorials on the official site. For European users worried about photos sitting on American cloud servers, this is a clean answer: your files never leave your laptop.

Samantha: And the practical use case beyond hobby photography: anyone editing photos for a small business, a real estate listing, a restaurant menu, a portfolio. You get professional output without paying a subscription that quietly renews every year. The download is on rawtherapee dot com, and it is free for personal and commercial use.

Organic Maps gives you offline navigation in Europe with no tracking, no ads and no account.

Bob: Final one, and this is the non-AI pick. Organic Maps. It is a free, open-source maps and navigation app built on OpenStreetMap data, the community-maintained mapping project that covers basically the entire world. The selling point: no tracking, no ads, no account, and crucially, full offline use. You download a country or a region once and you can navigate without any data connection.

Samantha: That makes it genuinely useful for travel inside Europe. If you are driving from Amsterdam to the south of France, or hiking in the Alps, or just trying to avoid roaming charges in a country your plan does not cover, you have full turn-by-turn navigation without burning mobile data. It also covers walking and cycling routes, which the bigger commercial apps still handle unevenly.

Bob: Users report that the cycling layer in particular is strong in countries with detailed OpenStreetMap coverage, which means Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark and Switzerland. Coverage in southern and eastern Europe is improving but still patchier in rural areas. It is available on iPhone and Android, the download is free, and there is no premium tier nudging you to upgrade.

Samantha: A useful weekend test: download your own country, switch your phone to airplane mode, and see whether you can still navigate to the supermarket. If yes, you have a backup that does not depend on a signal or a subscription. Today we covered: China's Z dot A I breaking into the global top three, IBM's zero point seven nanometer chip extending Moore's Law, Qualcomm's pivot into AI data centres with Microsoft and Meta on board, Wikipedia banning co-founder Larry Sanger, and two things to try yourself: RawTherapee for photo editing and Organic Maps for offline navigation.

Bob: Want to know more or react? Visit stateoftech dot e u or email us at info at doorzetters dot net.

Bob: State of Tech, the tech world in 15 minutes.